ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Casey Anthony was found
not guilty Tuesday of killing her 2-year-old daughter three years ago in a case
that captivated the nation as it played out on national television from the
moment the toddler was reported missing.
Anthony, 25, wept after the clerk read the verdict,
which jurors reached after less than 11 hours of deliberation over two days.
She was charged with first-degree murder, which could have brought the death
penalty if she had been convicted.
Instead, she was convicted of only four counts of
lying to investigators looking into the June 2008 disappearance of her daughter
Caylee. Her body was found in the woods six months later and a medical examiner
was never able to determine how she died.
Anthony will be sentenced by the judge on Thursday
and could receive up to a year in jail for each lying count.
After the verdict was read, Casey Anthony
hugged her attorney Jose Baez and later mouthed the words "thank you"
to him.
Prosecutors sat solemnly in their seats, looking
stunned. Prosecutor Jeff Ashton shook his head slightly from side to side in
apparent disbelief. Across the room, Anthony's father wiped tears from his
eyes. Without speaking to Casey, he and his wife left the courtroom escorted by
police as the judge thanked the jury.
"While we're happy for Casey, there are no
winners in this case," Baez said at a news conference afterward.
"Caylee has passed on far, far too soon. And what my driving force has
been for the last three years has been always to make sure that there has been
justice for Caylee and Casey, because Casey did not murder Caylee. It's that
simple."
He added: "This case has brought on new
challenges of all of us. Challenges in the criminal justice system, challenges
in the media, and I think we should all take this as an opportunity to learn
and to realize that you cannot convict someone until they've had their day in
court."
Anthony's attorneys claimed that the toddler
drowned accidentally in the family swimming pool, and that her seemingly
carefree mother in fact was hiding emotional distress caused by sexual abuse
from her father.
Prosecutors contended that Caylee was suffocated
with duct tape by a mother who loved to party, tattooed herself with the
Italian words for "beautiful life" in the month her daughter was
missing and crafted elaborate lies to mislead everyone from investigators to
her own parents.
Captivated observers camped outside the courthouse
to jockey for coveted seats in the courtroom gallery, which occasionally led to
fights among those desperate to watch the drama unfold.
Prior to the verdict on Tuesday, the judge said:
"To those in the gallery please do not express any signs of approval or
disapproval upon the reading of the verdict."
Anthony did not take the stand during the trial,
which started in mid-May. Because the case got so much media attention in
Orlando, jurors were brought in from the Tampa Bay area and sequestered for the
entire trial.
Baez conceded that his client had told elaborate
lies and invented imaginary friends and even a fake father for Caylee, but he
said that doesn't mean she killed her daughter.
"They throw enough against the wall and see
what sticks," Baez said of prosecutors during closing arugments.
"That is what they're doing ... right down to the cause of death."
He tried to convince jurors that the toddler
accidentally drowned in the family swimming pool and that when Anthony
panicked, her father, a former police officer, decided to make the death look
like a murder by putting duct tape on the girl's mouth and dumping the body in
woods about a quarter-mile away.
Her father firmly denied both the cover-up and abuse
claims. The prosecution called those claims "absurd," saying that no
one makes an accident look like a murder.
Lead prosecutor Linda Drane Burdick concluded the
state's case by showing the jury two side-by-side images. One showed
Casey Anthony smiling and partying in a nightclub during the month Caylee
was missing. The other was the tattoo she got a day before her family and law
enforcement first learned of the child's disappearance.
"At the end of this case, all you have to ask
yourself is whose life was better without Caylee?" Burdick asked.
"This is your answer."
Prosecutors hammered on the lies Anthony, then 22,
told from June 16, 2008, when her daughter was last seen, and a month later
when sheriff's investigators were notified. Those include the single mother
telling her parents she couldn't produce Caylee because the girl was with a
nanny named Zanny — a woman who doesn't exist; that she and her daughter were
spending time in Jacksonville, Fla., with a rich boyfriend who doesn't exist;
and that Zanny had been hospitalized after an out-of-town traffic crash and
that they were spending time with her.
Copyright
2011 The Associated Press.
(AP
Photo/Joe Burbank, Pool)
